Audio Essay: The End Of The Personal - Listen to an essay from The Catastrophe Hour
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Hi, it's Megan. This is a quick note to tell you about an exciting event that's coming up this October in New York City.

It's an unspeak-easy retreat on steroids. It's not only co-ed, since you guys have been asking for it, it is bigger than our usual retreats with more participants and a lot of speakers. Those speakers include John McWhorter, Peter Moskos, Mike Peska, Carol Hoeven, Lisa Sellin-Davis, Alana Newhouse, Ben Appel, Andrew Hartz, and a lot more. We are still adding speakers. Oh, and me, I will be there.

The way it's going to work is the speakers will do panels or be interviewed, sometimes by me, sometimes by other people. And pretty quickly, those panels will open up to include the attendees and it will turn into a discussion, not just an audience Q&A, but a real conversation where you can interact with your intellectual heroes.

Like all Unspeak Easy retreats, it is totally off the record. No social media. Everything that happens stays in the Unspeak Easy retreat. Beautiful space. It will be in a gorgeous space yet to be announced. This is happening October 11th and 12th from about 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day. Lunch is included.

It's co-ed and it will be unlike anything you've ever experienced and unlike anything we've ever done at The Unspeakeasy. Spaces are limited, so go to theunspeakeasy.com slash retreats to find out how to sign up. Hope to see you there.

Welcome to The Unspeakable Podcast. I'm your host, Megan Daum. This is a special edition of the podcast. It is a solo episode. It is audio only, and it's an audio experience of my new book, The Catastrophe Hour. Many of you have asked if there's an audio version of the book available. There is not currently. We are working on that. I am, however, launching a summer book club to talk about the book with you.

and there is an audio component. Since there are 14 essays in the book, we're going to do this over 14 weeks, starting June 11th and ending September 10th. And the way it's going to work is each week I will release a relatively short audio excerpt from the essay that we'll be discussing the following week. So in other words, on June 4th, I'll release an excerpt from the first essay, which we'll discuss at the first meeting on June 11th.

These meetings are taking place on Wednesdays on Zoom every Wednesday from 3 to 4 p.m. Eastern Time, noon to 1 p.m. Pacific Time. They will be available to paying Substack subscribers who have annual subscriptions.

right? Annual, okay? So that doesn't mean you need to be a founding member, though that's great if you are, but it does mean that you need to pay for the year upfront, which is better actually because it's much cheaper than paying month to month. I'm doing that because I want us to be a cohesive group. I don't want people just paying for a month so they can drop into a few meetings. This is an intimate literary genre, so I want an intimate group.

even if it's a big group, it can still be intimate. So you're going to get the Zoom meeting link information from a Substack post that I will publish for paying subscribers with all the information. And if you are a yearly paid member, you will indicate in the comments that you want to join and you will receive the link to join.

In the meantime, what you are about to hear is not an excerpt, but me reading an entire essay from the book, specifically the final essay, which is brand new, never before published. It's called The End of the Personal, and it's about, well...

the state of the personal essay, of personal writing, of personal expression in the current media sphere and in our minds generally. It's a bit different in tone and format than the other pieces in the book. Instead of using the I narrator, I embody this sort of generic persona that I just call the writer. You'll see, you'll hear. If you're not a paying subscriber, you'll get a little taste and then you'll need to join up to hear the rest.

It goes without saying that I hope you buy the book. You can buy it wherever you get your books. If you join the book club, you are going to have to buy the book because like I said, the audio excerpts I release every week are just going to be excerpts. Okay? So I hope this makes sense. There's a link in the show notes explaining things further. And in the meantime, here is the final essay of the Catastrophe Hour. Enjoy.

The Catastrophe Hour, Essay 14, The End of the Personal, August 2024. And so we enter the age of no reply. A man applying for a position at a major corporation goes through 12 interviews over six months. He is given written tests and asked for labor-intensive work samples. He is asked about his salary requirements and willingness to relocate.

He is told he is a finalist for this job and that a decision will be made soon. When the decision is made, the man only learns of it when he sees an ebullient social media announcement from the person who did get the job. He never hears from the employer again. A woman using dating apps goes on more than 40 dates over 18 months. No meaningful connections are made beyond an errant make-out session or a lackluster second or third date.

At least half the men disappear without a word after the initial connection.

Most of the rest are on the receiving end of her own disappearance. Everyone in this equation identifies as lonely. None can remember the last time they initiated a conversation with a stranger in real life. An eight-year-old child growing up in an ordinary household on an ordinary street in an ordinary town can neither ride a bicycle nor climb on a piece of playground equipment without experiencing a paralyzing fear of falling off.

Both activities require faith in the laws of physics he simply cannot muster, so he spends most of his time indoors. His parents feign dismay, but each is secretly relieved at the chance to remove these sources of childhood peril from their list of worries. To save face, each accuses the other of being too coddling.

A writer who built her career by, as she describes it, bleeding onto the page, turns anemic and wan. For years, her stories were a miraculous gift, one she'd been given by some random force of nature and freely bestowed on the world despite being stingy in her other affairs. But at some point in the latter part of her middle age, the stories lose their hold on her imagination.

The life that for decades offered up one delicious anecdote after another now serves a cuisine she cannot fully taste. The act of writing, thus, begins to feel like describing the contents of a dimly lit room. There is something there, but it's not there enough. Whereas her best work once seemed to emerge from her veins, it now struggles to make its way past the gates of her brain. Still, the writer's search...

That was a taste of my audio recording of the last essay in my book, The Catastrophe Hour, called The End of the Personal. If you want to hear the rest...

become a paying subscriber on the Substack at megandalm.substack.com or just theunspeakablepodcast.com. We'll take you there. If you want to join the book club to talk about the Catastrophe Hour this summer, which starts June 11th, make sure that you are not just a paying subscriber, but an annual paying subscriber, meaning you pay for the whole thing up front, the whole year up front. The book club, I think, is going to be amazing. So you're going to want to get in on that.

And in any case, just buy the book. You're going to need to buy the book if you want to join the book club. If you want to follow along, you don't want to be one of those people that just kind of like shows up for the wine because it's on Zoom. So I'm not going to be able to like serve you alcoholic beverages or any beverages.

In any case, thank you as always for listening. This has been a special episode of the podcast. I'm continuing to put out all kinds of episodes. So thank you for listening. And I will be back soon with very nuanced guests and super nuanced excerpts of essays from the Catastrophe Hour. See you then.